A little ‘Night’ music

In the University of North Texas’ A Jazz Dream, the characters and stories of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — including the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania — are set to a jazz score.

UNT departments join forces to jazz up Shakespeare

Denton Record-Chronicle

Published: 01 November 2012 09:38 AM

The opening show of the University of
North Texas’ 2012-13 theater season joins theater, dance, English, history and
music students. Guest director Maggie Harrer said the world premiere musical
calls for that kind of collaboration.

A Jazz Dream is the adaptation of
William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Harrer, the
dramaturge-in-chief and a longtime jazz fan, said she knew the popular
Shakespearean comedy was destined to be set as a musical.

“In fact, there was a Broadway musical
version of the play in the 1930s, but the script was lost. Some of the music
was saved,” said Harrer, a freelance director from New York City. “The play is
perfect for a jazz setting. You have the young lovers, the passion. And in
Shakespeare’s verse, iambic pentameter, the emphasis is on the second syllable.
In jazz, the emphasis is on the second beat. And that’s just like the
heartbeat, ba-BUM.”

Harrer enlisted faculty member Richard
DeRosa to lead graduate students in arranging songs she selected, from the
1890s to the 1930s, such as “Jeepers Creepers.” DeRosa’s students also composed
music just for the show.

The musical is set in Manhattan in the
present. Occupy Wall Street protesters have set up camp along the streets of
the Financial District. The barons of Wall Street are at a gala ball in the
Egyptian exhibit inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Central Park,
fairies and street artists resist the order of finance with the passion of creativity
and love.

UNT is producing the first staging of a
musical Harrer said she hopes to open on Broadway — after productions in two
other U.S. regions.

— Lucinda Breeding

A JAZZ DREAM, THE MUSICAL

• What: World
premiere of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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